He didn’t mean THAT kind of prove him wrong
So the pillow guy said “Prove me wrong and I’ll give you 5 million dollars!” So someone proved him wrong and he hasn’t paid up. He has to pay up.
Mike Lindell has to pay $5 million for losing his “Prove Mike Wrong” 2020 election challenge, an arbitration panel has ruled.
In a decision dated Wednesday, the panel found software developer Robert Zeidman had won Lindell’s 2021 contest challenging experts to prove that data he had was not from the 2020 election, and directed the MyPillow founder to pay him the reward money he’d promised in the next 30 days.
…
The contest took place in August 2021 at a cyber symposium that Lindell — an outspoken election denier and conspiracy theorist — was hosting in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
As part of the symposium, Lindell announced a contest called the “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” in which participants were asked to find proof that his cyber data was not valid data from the November election, the ruling said. The announcement said: “For the people who find the evidence, 5 million is their reward.”
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Among the attendees at the symposium was Zeidman, a Donald Trump voter who was excited to see the evidence Lindell had turned up.
Zeidman “wanted it to be 2020 election data,” said his attorney, Brian Glasser of Bailey & Glasser LLP.
Imagine his chagrin when he found otherwise!
Lie down with pillows, get up with feathers.
I saw an interview with Zeidman. He’s a computer forensics expert. He went in assuming that Lindell would have set up the challenge so that no one could win. It turned out that Lindell didn’t have any election data at all. The data was a bunch of files of mostly random text and numbers that had been munged to look like PDF or word documents. It only took Ziedman a couple of hours to analyze the data and show that there was no there there.
Shades of McCarthyism – “I have in my hand…” as he waved a blank sheet of paper.
It might have been an empty statement, off the cuff, but he made it publicly and now he pays. He didn’t set it up as carefully as Kent Hovind did with his faux challenge to prove evolution. Hovind at least set rules to make it impossible to defeat (and never had the money, anyway.)